The Sparrowhawk Companion (7 page)

Let me cite two important events: the debates on the Stamp Act in Parliament, and the debates over the Stamp Act Resolves in the General Assembly, dramatized in
Book Four: Empire
.

Many of the actual speeches made by George Grenville, Isaac Barré, and other actual members of the Commons are excerpted in the novel. The two major fictive speeches made by Dogmael Jones and Henoch Pannell represent the fundamental, opposing positions taken by the parties; Pannell’s an expression of contempt for the colonies, Jones’s a spirited defense of them. But, the climax of the debates was the vote on the Stamp Act. The record shows that it was unanimous, with no dissenting votes noted.

Jones, of course, would have voted against the Act, and his would have been the single, lone dissent. To “conform” to the actual record, and to underscore the venality rife in the Commons at that time, I have Grenville’s secretary bribe the House clerk not to record Jones’s dissenting vote in the official journal.

Hugh Kenrick calls the General Assembly a “cameo” of Parliament. Complementing the absence of Jones’s dissenting vote in the Commons journal was the subsequent expunction of Patrick Henry’s fifth Resolve, and probably the sixth and seventh, as well, from the Burgesses’s journal. There are contradictory accounts on whether or not the sixth and seventh were even introduced, debated, and voted on, one by an anonymous Frenchman who witnessed the debates, the other by Lieutenant-Governor Francis Fauquier in his official report to the Board of Trade in London.

The contradictory accounts create a unique lacuna. Which account is true? Whose veracity, the Frenchman’s or the Lieutenant-Governor’s, should one place more weight on? Without any supporting evidence one way or the other, and in this instance there is none, it is anyone’s educated
guess about what actually happened. One would think that such an epochal event would have been meticulously documented. But, either it was not, or if it was, the records perished, or are molding undiscovered in someone’s attic or in some library’s special collections.

The greater gap was the means by which all seven of Henry’s Resolves were broadcast to colonial newspapers outside of Virginia. There is no record of who was responsible for sending them. Henry at that time was a freshman burgess for his county, and it is doubtful that he knew any of the editors of those newspapers. Accounts of the event and biographies of the principal actors simply gloss over the subject. (My own unsupported theory is that it was Richard Henry Lee, burgess for Westmoreland County, who, because of the animus between him and the conservative Tidewater gentry that controlled the House, was not present during the Resolves debates that spring but who published his own protest of the Stamp Act.)

The Resolves, to our knowledge, were not reported in the
Virginia Gazette
, which was controlled by the Lieutenant-Governor, who dissolved the Assembly over the Resolves. The numbers of the
Gazette
from that period are missing. Perhaps one of Henry’s allies in the House was responsible. The evidence of responsibility is simply absent. So, I hit upon a means for the Resolves to be sent “abroad.”

It was important that I devise a means of disseminating the Resolves, for they served to unite the colonies for the first time in a common cause, which was to challenge Parliamentary authority. I date the true beginning of the Revolution to the summer of 1765.

Let us examine Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Speech as I dramatize it in
Book Four: Empire
of
Sparrowhawk
together with a historian’s account of the actual event. I will use excerpts from Carl Bridenbaugh’s
Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth Century Williamsburg
(1950, Colonial Williamsburg Press, pp. 60-65).

Bridenbaugh writes that an anonymous Frenchman reports his arrival [from York County] in the House of Burgesses just as Patrick Henry rose to deliver his “Cæsar had his Brutus” speech. The Frenchman claims in his diary that Henry apologized for his remarks to Speaker Robinson. However, there is no reason to ascribe any veracity
or accuracy to his report, especially since he did not report important episodes during the debates. For example, he reports that the sixth and seventh Resolves were “hotly debated,” although Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier claims they were not debated. Who is to be believed?

Bridenbaugh writes, “They [either Henry and his House allies, or just his allies] carefully saw to it that copies of the four recorded Resolves plus the one expunged and the two withheld were sent to Philadelphia correspondents for use where they would do the most good. From this metropolis they were dispatched by water to Rhode Island, and six of them made their first appearance in Samuel Hall’s
Newport Mercury
for June 24, 1765.” Who was responsible? There is no record of responsibility extant. The
Boston Gazette
on July 1, together with other colonial newspapers, printed all seven Resolves.

Bridenbaugh’s entire account of the session of May 1765 is skeptical, if not deprecatory, of virtually every fact he presents in it, especially when he discusses Henry. But his account is but one of several I consulted while putting together the data to write Chapter 9: The Resolves, in Part Two of
Book Four
.

One possible reason that no one living then claimed responsibility for disseminating the Resolves to the other colonies is that he could have been charged with treason or sedition by the Crown. If Samuel Hall of the
Newport Mercury
received signed correspondence from the party or parties who sent him the Resolves, it has not survived. If it had survived, this and other gaps in the historical record would have been filled, and we would have more conclusive knowledge of what happened.

Fans of the
Sparrowhawk
series have pleaded with me to continue it, but they must be content with its fiery conclusion on the York River in September of 1775. I accomplished in the last chapters of
Book Six
what I had set out to do. One can imagine that the epic could be extended indefinitely, but to attempt that would be, for me, a pointless anticlimax and a violation of the story’s integrity. As it stands, in terms of its plot and theme, the series goes full circle to its beginnings in
Books One
and
Two
.

Compiled by Edward Cline

At the beginning of
Book One
, Parson Robert Parmley advises young Jack Frake: “If ever you must choose a name or symbol for something important, think on it most earnestly.”

I heeded his advice. One of the pleasanter research tasks of
Sparrowhawk
was the creation of over 370 character and place names. The etymological root meaning of Jack’s surname is “man warrior,” from the Old English “freake,” which in turn meant a man who was exceptional or outstanding. Friends have remarked that
Frake
is too harsh sounding. But harshness is what I sought; the harsher, or blunter the name, the more memorable it would be. The root meaning of Hugh Kenrick’s surname is “man hero.” Researching and choosing their names from among a dozen candidates required my best attention, because they are the principal heroes of the series; I needed to be comfortable working with them over the course of what would become the approximately seven million words in the series.

Most of the names of the principal characters required nearly the same degree of attention and selectivity, chosen from a long list of candidates I compiled chiefly from ships’ passenger rosters of the eighteenth century, and many from other sources. Most of the character and place names in the series are contemporaneous with the eighteenth century. When I could not find a character name I was happy with, I
invented one; and if the invented name were not strictly contemporaneous, then it had to be credibly so.

For space reasons, I cannot discuss the root meanings or associations of all 370 names, so I will highlight only a handful here. Many of the characters appear in only one or two
Books
; others occur in all six.

First, about some place names. To my knowledge, no such place as
Onyxcombe
exists in England. The name of Crispin Hillier’s constituency in Dorset is a combination of a precious stone, “onyx,” and “combe,” Old English for a kind of coastal valley. Too late did I realize, by the time I had finished writing
Book Two
, that I had intruded upon Thomas Hardy country by inventing a town, a river, and an aristocracy to alter the makeup of the shire of Dorset; they are as fictive as Hardy’s “Wessex.” See young Hugh Kenrick’s description of his ancestral part of Dorset in Chapter 11 of
Book Two
. While researching the towns and topography of Cornwall, I chanced upon a town called “Morvel.” I changed it to
Marvel
; my subconscious kept translating
Morvel
to “morbid village” and the connotation did not agree with me.
Gwynnford
is an adaptation of the name of the hero in Victor Hugo’s
The Man Who Laughs
.

The rotten borough of
Swansditch
in London across old London Bridge adjacent to Southwark is also nonexistent. Dogmael Jones neatly presents its history and etymology near the end of
Book Three
. The fictive rotten borough of
Canovan,
once Augustus Skelly’s and appropriated by Henoch Pannell, is a borrowing from an earlier (unpublished) suspense novel of mine.
Lion Key
, first mentioned in
Book Two
, sits in an evidentiary purgatory. Maps of mid-eighteenth-century London show a number of keys or wharves in the Pool of London, and all but one could be accounted for in terms of their past owners. Records for Lion Key were not extant, however; its ownership proved untraceable. Lion Key came into the possession of Benjamin Worley and Sons, commercial agents of the Kenrick family.

Personal names.
Etáin
means “shining one”; what better name for the future romantic interest of my heroes?
Reverdy
was initially a problem. I encountered the name only once, on a passenger roster. Usually such rosters featured an emigrant’s name, followed by a trade or profession.
Reverdy
appeared by itself, with no trade or profession
appended to it. At first sight, it struck me as an eminently feminine name, rich in connotation, and so it became one.
Dogmael
is a distinctive name, as well, Welsh meaning “bringer of light to children.” What more appropriate name for a barrister who attempts to introduce reason and justice into his court cases and speaks eloquently for them in the chamber of the House of Commons, packed as it was with a few hundred dimly lit members?

Redmagne
? I encountered this name only once, as well, in my voluminous reading of eighteenth–century pamphlets, newspapers, and screeds.
Glorious Swain
explains his name to young Hugh Kenrick in
Book Two
, and the origin of John
Proudlocks
occurs in
Book Three
.
Effney
is my personal variation on
Ethne
, the name of the romantic interest in A.E.W. Mason’s
The Four Feathers
.

The villains. In selecting these names I relied more on euphony, rhythm, and connotation than on etymology. Their names had to be memorably distasteful. Thus, for example,
Jared Turley
, the Earl’s bastard son and long arm of malice, and
Alden Curle
, the fawning, secretly sneering butler and major domo of Windridge Court. As for
Claybourne
, the Earl’s suffering but obsequious personal valet, I trust his name needs no explication.
Pannell
’s root meaning is “pain”; what tax collector and supporter of oppressive legislation isn’t one?

Across the ocean in Caxton, Virginia, there is
Albert Acland
, an Anglican cleric acridly hostile to all things revolutionary. The reader never meets
Amos Swart,
the slovenly, careless former owner of Brougham Hall, bought and salvaged by Hugh Kenrick and renamed Meum Hall. There was a wealth of slave names to choose from, many of them of obvious or probable African origin, such as
Bilico
,
Dilch,
and
Benabe.

I did not intend writing a
roman à clef
, but
Sparrowhawk
abounds with subtle tributes to favorite individuals and things. I leave most of them to a literary scholar to discover and reveal, if such a project is ever undertaken. These names represent not only characters, but also places and even ships. They might refer to a personal friend, a favorite play, novel, or author, to a character in a novel or movie. This was a practice I began with my very first (unpublished) novel and have continued without guilt or regret ever since. A few of these “namesakes” are fairly
obvious, and the individuals they salute know who they are. Most, however, are more or less disguised.
Morland
, for example, was once James Bond’s preferred brand of cigarette, while
Meservy
also has its origins in the Fleming novels.
Winslow
LeGrand’s name reveals my appreciation for Terence Rattigan’s plays, and Nathan
Rickerby
can thank Mickey Spillane for his place in
Book Two
.
Hillier
and
Kemp
are taken from H.G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
, the first novel I ever read (after seeing director George Pal’s 1960 version of it), and which ignited my intellectual curiosity about the world I lived in.

Ship names were also a pleasure to create. Many that appear in the series were of actual warships of the period, such as the
Rainbow
,
Fowey
, and
Diligence
, stationed in Hampton Roads. The merchantmen
Roilance
and
Galvin
, though, are purely fictive, and are the namesakes of two modern British composers. There was a
Sparrow-Hawk
warship in the seventeenth century—it ran aground off Cape Cod—but my
Sparrowhawk
owes its name to the Curtis Sparrowhawk fighter-reconnaissance biplanes of the Navy and Army Air Corp in the first half of the twentieth century. It is noteworthy that in the Age of Enlightenment merchant and naval vessels were given names either from Greek or Roman mythology and history, or names indigenous to the eighteenth century. Thus Skelly’s original merchant ship, the
Pegasus
, before his outlaw career, and his smuggling ship,
The Hasty Hart
, adapted from the title of a play by John Patrick.